Our Scientific Advisors

Warren Zapol

Scientific Advisory Board Chairman

Warren M. Zapol, MD, is the emeritus anesthetist-in-chief at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Reginald Jenney Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School. From 1994 to 2008, Dr. Zapol served as anesthetist-in-chief at MGH and is currently the director of the MGH Anesthesia Center for CriticalCare Research. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Rochester School of Medicine, Dr. Zapol’s major research efforts include studies of acute respiratory failure in animals and humans. Supported by the National Science Foundation, he has led nine Antarctic expeditions to study the diving mechanisms and adaptations of the Weddell seal. Through that research, his team learned how marine mammals avoid the bends and hypoxia (low blood oxygen levels). He was elected to membership in the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Science in 2002. In 2003, he was awarded the Intellectual Property Owners Association’s “Inventor of the Year” award for the treatment of hypoxic human newborns with inhaled nitric oxide, a technique now used to save the lives of thousands of infants each year, which he pioneered with his MGH team. In 2006, a glacier on the tallest mountain range in Antarctica was named for Dr. Zapol. In 2008, he was appointed by President George W. Bush and in 2012 reappointed by President Barack Obama as an academic representative to the U.S. Arctic Research Commission. In 2010, he presented the John W. Severinghaus Lecture on translational research at the American Society of Anesthesiologists annual meeting, and in 2012, he was designated as a Distinguished Scientist by the American Heart Association.